


Because the sun had set

by acaramelmacchiato



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Victorian Attitudes, unrequited blowjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-29 22:16:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15738408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/pseuds/acaramelmacchiato
Summary: Crozier stays on Erebus after Sir John's death to impart some polite words of comfort to Fitzjames and get some whiskey in the process. Things escalate.





	Because the sun had set

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone I've ever met thought I am somehow capable of resisting writing doomed Victorians in the navy one of whom canonically talks too much? well, haha. you would be wrong. Thank you to sath for prompt, "crozier and fitzjames had drunken sex once but only one of them remembers and it's tremendously awkward." A true pal.

 

The polar region had far worse deaths to offer than what had been dealt to Sir John Franklin – much earlier in life, or after long suffering, and even in the most haunting circumstances of extreme loneliness. Crozier had seen much of it in the Arctic over the years, and heard of some of the rest, and on this grim barometer Sir John’s passing fell somewhere very mild. This thought, however logical, did not help anyone’s grief – Sir John had been a friend to Crozier, and a beloved and upright father to many. Everywhere on both ships were the charming stories and artifacts that would make his legacy. If in fact they were able to bring any of it home.

He was halfway into his slops and therefore a quarter of the way home to _Terror_ when all these many manners of Arctic death became distracting, reciting themselves in his head like they were the Articles of War and absolutely inescapable. He needed a drop of whiskey. A medicinal amount, enough to see him back to his ship. But getting it was as tricky a puzzle as navigating any ice field – he would have to enter _Erebus’s_ wardroom, where Fitzjames was probably weeping. Crozier would then have to offer some words of comfort, sufficient to the occasion but succinct enough not to drag out the interview.

He put his coat on a peg and headed back, clomping in a way that was partially unavoidable but also tactful. Anyone in the wardroom would hear him approach. Crozier considered for a hopeful moment that maybe it would not be Fitzjames at all, but someone he could ignore like a lieutenant or a steward.

He knocked and entered. There were no lieutenants or stewards, not even a lit lamp, just the lonely commander of _Erebus_ , looking so pathetic that Crozier was almost cured of his want of whiskey.

But only almost. He stepped inside. “James.”

“Oh, Captain Crozier,” said Fitzjames, who sometimes seemed to forget that the custom among officers in Arctic service was informality. He gestured somewhat languidly to the cut-crystal laid out before him. “I see you’ve sniffed out my open bottle. Well, there you are, please don’t let me hold you back.”

“I haven’t come for that,” he lied.

“Of course you have. Pour yourself a glass and you may be on your way so much the sooner. Your eight men have an early day of packing up tomorrow.”

The bottle of whiskey glinted enticingly in the low light. Fitzjames caught him looking at it, sighed, and sloshed some into a new glass. Crozier took a seat at the table, but he was sure he had to say something before he could drink. Some words of comfort, he had decided. Brief ones.

“When my father died—”

“I would so much rather,” Fitzjames interrupted, “hear what is a doubtlessly fantastic rustic bildungsroman some other time.”

Crozier had crossed some bar, he felt, in at least trying to speak. He rewarded himself with a long sip of whiskey. “When my father died, I felt almost nothing compared to what I felt at the death of Sir Thomas Staines, under whom I served on my first voyages. I had no inclination at all of how to be in the world without Sir Thomas. I had always, even into adulthood, consulted his example. And even then, I was not half as stricken as I find myself now at what has befallen Sir John.”

“One would hardly know it, from how long it took you to countermand his last wishes.”

Fitzjames was making him work hard for his drink. Crozier looked at him directly.

“I do not deny that there were differences between Sir John and myself. And I accept your opinion of my recent orders. But know this: I share your grief sincerely.”

“It has been a calamitous day,” said Fitzjames, “and I find myself with little patience for whatever it is you are trying to say. Let us do each other some charity and drink our whiskey swiftly and in silence.”

“Whatever else, you know me to be an honest man. I say I share your grief sincerely, James, ” Crozier repeated. “And I do. So if you desire to grieve in silence, let us stay silent for a moment.”

Fitzjames stared at him, and, “I say,” was the only comprehensible phrase in a general aristocratic muttering that meant he was at a loss for words. He then raised his glass, observed it, and drained it. Crozier immediately poured him another, and another for himself.

In this fashion, within an hour and a half they had abandoned the notion of silence and warmed to each other.

“Lord, but Sir John would have a fit if he saw us,” said Fitzjames with a tentative, reminiscent smile. “Liquor in his wardroom. And at such an hour. You know he used to say, ‘ _Erebus_ , gentlemen, not _Tartarus_ ,’ if one of us even had red cheeks at his table. Once someone answered back, ‘And yonder ship, sir, is _Achlys_ ,’ referring of course to that dismal goddess said by Hesiod to personify misery, and – forgive me,” Fitzjames stopped himself, flushing redder than he was already. They had lit one of the table lamps, and couldn’t see much more than each other’s faces in the shadowy wardroom. “Forgive me please, I had not been thinking. Sir John told the man off, you know. Of course.”

“Of course,” said Crozier. But he knew that sober and in the morning, he would remember this moment and be stung to know such sport was made of him on _Erebus_.

“To Sir John,” said Fitzjames, still so hot with embarrassment that his glass fogged dramatically when it touched his lip. “The man who ate his boots.”

“He’ll be glad, then, that he won’t be buried in them,” said Crozier, who was drunk and hopeful enough to try a salvo of his own generally unpopular humor. He felt himself grinning crookedly at Fitzjames and instantly fearing his comment would prompt great offense, and he would lose what he had just gained.

But Fitzjames laughed, at first in partial surprise and then in earnest. He slapped his knee. Crozier joined in, grateful as an awkward schoolboy to have his joke appreciated.

Witnessing his own unguarded behavior, he knew he’d suffer in the morning. For Fitzjames it would likely be a different story. Crozier had seen him drunk precisely once, at the Admiralty’s party, standing in his bright uniform and exaggerated contrapposto. His hair was shorter then – wasn’t everyone’s – and betrayed a gentle curl. But that was years ago and Crozier hadn’t seen him drunk since – he was aboard _Erebus_ , not _Tartarus_. Not since they shoved off, not on New Year’s Day, not on his birthday. In short, not at all, thanks to their pietistic commander. Tomorrow Crozier would have a headache, but Fitzjames would probably wish himself in Sir John’s grave.

Crozier winced at the idea. Fitzjames, whose laughter had died, looked at him curiously.  

“I was just thinking,” Crozier explained, “that tomorrow morning might be more than usually terrible.”

“And don’t forget, you’ll have to give a service. Have you a bible?”

“Of course. I am on the same expedition as you are. _Terror_ carries as much weight in bibles as we have in ballast.”

“Mind you well that it is from the former which you must read a passage.”

Crozier understood that for the past hour they had engaged in a kind of flirtation, though it was in reduced circumstances and almost parodic as everything had been for years. But human nature was tenacious, and for Crozier the experience of someone beginning to like him was as intoxicating as the drink.

“You are kindness itself, James,” he said.

“Let me dazzle you, then. Aboard the _Pyramus_ , I had occasion to learn from the ship’s doctor that the only cure for the effects of drink that is worth what that medical gentleman called ‘a damn,’ is some vinegar at your temples. I have tried it myself and do heartily agree. And Francis, we few, we happy few – we have _so much_ vinegar, and therefore nothing to fear.”

“Vinegar is as well as may be. But we do have much to fear.”

“You are indefatigably morbid.”

“That is the type of morbid you want to be in the discovery service.”

“Of course you’re right, I was unkind. Sir John would have told me off for that. He never suffered anyone to disrespect you, Francis, not even – especially not – me. He sang your praises like a favored,” here Fitzjames stopped but seemed to find himself without anything else he could plausibly say other than what he had begun: “Lord, Francis, like a favored son.”

“I was never that to him,” said Crozier. “You know he would not accept me in his family – he refused to countenance it.”

Fitzjames looked at his hands. “I do not deny I heard him say so. Though I cannot say why he spoke as he did, why he was not himself. I am sorry for it, that is what I can say.”

“Miserable, he called me. And distant, and hard to love,” said Crozier. Some part of his soul cringed to hear such an obvious play for sympathy. But the reward – the balm of gentle treatment, of kindness, and whatever else – was impossible for him to forgo.

Sir John had called him weak in his vices.

“But you are none of those things,” Fitzjames reached across the corner of the table and took one of Crozier’s hands in two of his. “He was not himself, Francis, understand.”

Crozier let shame at his actions wait for him aboard _Terror_ where it would surely find him in the morning, and did not withdraw. “I say again, you are kindness itself.”

Fitzjames then lifted Crozier’s hand to his lips and whispered against it: “Then let me be kinder still.”

If anything on earth could make the prudish ghost of Sir John Franklin howl screaming out of the afterlife, it would have been the sound of a chair scraping across the floor of his own wardroom as Commander James Fitzjames of H.M.S _Erebus_ knelt before Captain Crozier of H.M.S _Terror_ to open his trousers.

There was no such event. Crozier breathed a sigh of relief both ironic and superstitious, and his own chair made a second scraping sound as he stood up. “I hope you’ll be as kind as you want to be,” he said, lowering his voice to a near-whisper.

It occurred to him that the last person to handle him in this fashion had been Miss Sophia Cracroft, and between the two encounters he could not completely say which would be the more upsetting to Sir John.

Then Fitzjames surpassed even Miss Cracroft’s considerable boldness, and Crozier sighed as happily as he dared.

He breathed deeply and held onto the table with one hand. As for the other – Fitzjames was a naval officer, and despite the circumstances and Crozier’s personal apathy about rank he could not quite bring himself to put a hand in such a man’s hair. He placed it instead on a shoulder, as if giving comradely encouragement.

Outside the ice cracked and moaned. The wind howled. Nothing lived but the thing that hunted them. But Crozier, amazingly, could in the moment almost imagine himself home. In transgressing dangerously, in biting his lip as his cock was swallowed in an unlocked room, he felt civilization just as whole and close and as suffocating as it was in London or Banbridge.

There were footsteps just beyond the wardroom. The unlocked door, the sound of the sailors close at hand, and of course the act itself, a glorious victory in his occasional battles to not be despised, helped him to achieve a quick but satisfactory conclusion.

When the deed was done, Fitzjames stood as ungracefully as he might have at sea and disappeared for a moment into Sir John’s cabin and his private water closet. In a minute he came back and braced himself with a swallow of whiskey. He looked at Crozier inscrutably.

“Thank you, James,” said Crozier, wondering what was expected of him. Society was far away again. It was no longer robust and tyrannical but elusive, desired, and partially forgotten – and he had no idea what to do next but followed a vague inclination that a man ought to be thanked. “Truly. For your compassion, for—”

“If we are at the end of the world, Francis, what else is left to us?”

“I do not believe it is exactly that.”

“The end of the world,” said Fitzjames again, talking quietly and probably to himself. He cast a glance at the window, where outside wind tore at them. “We have tarried too long on the ice, and God has not come for us.”

It was the last thing Crozier remembered before waking, by some undeserved miracle, in his own bed. Jopson was lighting his lamps.

He had not written a service.

He groaned, cursed himself and whiskey and the Arctic and the Navy, and waited for Fitzjames to come over and kill him. It was well-deserved for any number of reasons, for putting such a dent in his whiskey, for making malapropos jokes about Sir John on the night of that man’s own death, for somehow willing into reality the intimacy itself, and on top of that not reciprocating – which was not only caddish but actually rude.

In a minute Jopson got him up and dressed and dosed with the hair of the dog that had bit him, all while Crozier had horrifying visions of himself telling Fitzjames that Sir John had been proud of him, of unburdening himself about the whole sorry tale of Miss Cracroft, of sitting there after Fitzjames had gotten him off like it was just a favor and not one half of an equal exchange.

Jopson was gently reminding him of the morning’s schedule, stressing that a service was very much anticipated, and that, “Commander Fitzjames is here to see you, sir.”

“Ah,” said Crozier. Fitzjames, probably mortified and angry and whom he should have fellated last night. “Let him come.”

Jopson opened the door to admit Fitzjames, looking ill but not actually outraged. He immediately helped himself to a chair.

“Lord, Francis,” he said. “I mean really, good Christ. You do that every night?”

“Hardly that,” Crozier said cautiously. “How do you fare?”

“Words cannot convey,” said Fitzjames. “You know I thought I had an absolute cure for this sort of thing? Vinegar, applied to the temples. Absolute rubbish. It turns out the real trick is to be nineteen.”

“You had mentioned it.”

Fitzjames dragged a hand down his face and laughed ruefully. “Did I? Lord, I might have. Well, I don’t mind telling you, Francis, for such a long night I remember very little indeed, not even lighting a lamp.”

“You remember nothing?” Crozier was not up to hiding his urgency.

“If you can imagine it! I have not the foggiest of ideas what we got up to after the fourth drink or so, and it’s a pity because it seems we were having a jolly old time and are now well on our way to becoming regular friends. I wish I could forget as much of the day that preceded it. Which rather brings me to the purpose of my visit – the service – I believe I may have a solution.”

Crozier felt more horrible than what he had already consigned himself to. Fitzjames was not trying to move lightly past his indignity. He had actually forgotten it. Was such a thing even possible to forget? Not for long, surely. Crozier was a veteran inebriate and had often enough picked up a single night’s memories over the course of a week. Fitzjames would remember, there was no doubt – it might be during Sir John’s service, or drifting off to sleep, or when next he tasted whiskey – and when he did, the newfound congeniality would be gone like the sun in the Arctic autumn.

“What about the service?” Crozier asked him. His voice was rough.

Fitzjames stared at him, reacting to the unfriendliness he clearly did not expect. “I say, well yes, to the point it is. Sir John’s last days were largely occupied in the writing of a service for Lt. Gore which includes a lengthy and as you may expect, very moving sermon. It is something the men should hear, I think, and we may put ourselves out of two difficulties at once by making use of it.”

“Fine. I shall read Sir John’s words over him. Was there anything else?”

Fitzjames stood, drawing reserve back around him against Crozier's coldness. It was more painful than the headache, to treat someone so unreasonably. But he would remember, soon enough, and Crozier's rebuff would be nothing compared to the ways in which a man like Fitzjames might lash out against the author of such great shame. 

“At present, that is all,” he said, and put on his hat. “Good morning, Captain Crozier.”

"Good morning, Commander Fitzjames." 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Well there you go there's a cautionary fanfiction about drinking with your coworkers when you're a cranky Victorian sea captain and your boss has just been eaten by a magic bear. News you can use!
> 
> 1\. The vinegar thing is a real hangover cure from 1824. Or it is according to the Buzzfeed list of old timey hangover cures I consulted after googling "Victorian hangover cure." Not to be rude but I bet it doesn't work?
> 
> 2\. Speaking of which I was very distressed to learn that "hangover" was not used until the 1900s. 
> 
> 3\. Listen I don't know if that Staines comment has any real probability of being true. He did give the actual Crozier his first promotion and hired him on another ship so like. Maybe? It is more likely that Crozier's heroes were Arctic explorers but they were all alive at this point. 
> 
> 4\. Which sexual encounter of Crozier's would be more upsetting to Franklin? RT for Sophia Cracroft, fav for James Fitzjames
> 
> 5\. ┏┓  
> ┃┃╱╲ In this  
> ┃╱╱╲╲ house  
> ╱╱╭╮╲╲ our fanfiction  
> ▔▏┗┛▕▔ does not recognize  
> ╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲  
> ╱ erectile dysfunction ╲  
> ╱ as a symptom of ╲  
> ╱chronic lead exposure╲  
> ╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲  
> ▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔


End file.
